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Very simply put, a lucid dream is a dream in which you are aware that you are dreaming. So long as you remain conscious of this fact you remain lucid (‘lucid’ is synonomous with ‘aware’ or ‘clarity’.) Lucidity is a sense or more a ‘knowing’ of your participation in dream reality, brought about by the realization that you’re dreaming.

The degree of your lucidity will vary between lucid dreams. You may be dimly aware that this is a dream, you may be consciously participating in a ‘normal dream’, you may have partial recognition and control, or you may be fully aware and awake inside your own dream world. This last is what most lucid dreamers aim for.

You’re likely to experience each of these in stages as you learn lucid dreaming, and each experience is a kind of breakthrough into greater awareness. As you increase this dreaming awareness, the more fully lucid dreams happen more regularly. For this reason lucid dreaming does get easier every time, just as with any practice you can get good at.

Lucid Dreaming implies a certain degree of dream control, though this also develops over time. Mostly because it takes a while for it to sink into your conscious awareness in a usable way that you can do anything, that you actually are control. But once you ‘get’ that, the possibilities are limitless!

I’ve spoken to plenty of people about lucid dreaming, and it’s interesting to hear how many people have had lucid dream experiences spontaneously. It’s a lot more common than one might think, simply because it’s not something everyone talks about that often. Not many people realize it’s something you can learn to do intentionally and regularly, mostly these short lucid dreams get passed off as curiosities and aren’t very well developed.

There is usually a brief recognition that you’re dreaming, and without knowing what to do with it, you often end up just falling back into ‘normal dream’ mode. It doesn’t seem all that significant in the dream itself, and as a result is not always a very clear lucid moment when one wakes up. It’s really an unfortunate thing that we are taught dreams are not really important or significant. Most people don’t know what they’re missing out on because their ‘lucid moment’ didn’t result in anything particularly special.

So whether you arrive at that lucid moment in your dreams spontaneously or intentionally, the thing to remember is that it is *significant*. It’s *highly* important! You are doing something amazing, and you need to realize how amazing it is while you’re doing it, so you stay lucid, aware and conscious. You are experiencing a new form of consciousness! It isn’t every day you get to blend your dreaming and waking selves into a new identity that can be so self-aware inside a dream you know. Well, it isn’t every day to begin with, but it can be, and if you make it your quest, it will be.

This is why the attitude of ‘it’s just a dream’ will ruin your chances of becoming an expert dreamer. It makes dreaming seem unimportant. It derides the value of your own consciousness and makes a mockery of your own direct experience. You wouldn’t take half your waking life and say ‘nah, it doesn’t matter what I do so I think I’ll just wander around like a zombie’ (plastic people aside.) But this is exactly what one does to one’s dreaming life if it simply isn’t *valued*. Start valuing it and it will take you a long way..

Lucid Dreams can happen whenever regular dreams happen. When we sleep we go through a number of different cycle of consciousness, delving deep into our psyche and ‘resurfacing’ a number of times. There are typically around four or five major dream periods in a single night, approximately an hour and a half apart, but getting close together as the night progresses. Each period can contain multiple dreams, so there is plenty of opportunity to make the most of our dreams.

When we start training our dream recall, we can find ourselves becoming more conscious and even waking up in the periods in between cycles of sleep, where before we were unaware. This gives us an excellent opportunity to record dreams we would otherwise forget, furthering our dreaming memory, but not just that… It helps us to become lucid because we are becoming conscious at just the times which are most conducive to lucid dreaming!

Lucid dreams usually occur at around these times because we are far closer to our waking consciousness and able to activate our conscious mind more easily. Not only may we find ourselves becoming aware or fully lucid just prior to waking in these periods, they are also the times in which lucid dream induction can be the most effective. With practice you can re-enter the dream you just had consciously or instigate a new lucid dream through your intention, with little or no break in consciousness as you do so!

It might seem a little strange to consider that you have more than one identity at first, but when we look at identity we realize it’s not a fixed thing anyway. Are you the same person you were yesterday? What about five years ago? As we see, identity changes over time. When we make the transition from waking to dreaming, we also transit from our waking self to our dreaming self so that we can operate proficiently in dreaming reality.

To ‘get’ this, let’s use an analogy. If you hold both hands out wide, one hand is your waking self and the other hand is your dreaming self. If you turn your head and shift your focus from one hand to the other and back, is either one ‘less you’ or ‘less real’? Of course not. Both exist simultaneously and are equally valid. So when we switch between our waking and dreaming selves, we are just changing focus. We may or may not remember we have another ‘hand’, another identity while we’re busy using the other one! And in the same way, your waking and dreaming selves are both still ‘you’.

One of the many benefits of lucid dreaming is that by training our lucidity, we are opening channels between our waking self and dreaming self identities, blending them in a way that will enrich the experience of both. We are integrating into a more whole being. We bring more of the creativity and knowing of our dreaming abilities into waking life, and the sharpness of conscious focus, intent and reflection into the dream world. And in the process, we get to explore lots of new ideas and have a whole heap of fun!

The really good news is that you can intentionally instigate or ‘induce’ lucid dreams. There are two main ways of doing this. With some training, you can enter directly into a lucid dream from the waking state. This is called ‘Wake Initiated Lucid Dreaming’ or WILD for short. This technique is very similar to many astral projection techniques in that you consciously transition from the waking to the sleeping state.

But most lucid dreaming techniques involve learning to ‘wake up’ within a normal dream, at which point you decide what you want to do from there. This is called ‘Dream Initiated Lucid Dreaming’ or DILD. There are a number of different ways of doing this, and some are more effective than others. Whatever you use to remind you that you’re dreaming, there is usually a point where your conscious awareness is triggered, or in other words you have a ‘lucid moment’.

For most lucid dreamers, various DILD techniques are the common practice, and with some experience one can then train in getting good at the WILD method. WILDs are typically sought after because they are on average as mind-blowing or moreso as fully lucid DILD experiences. They have also been called ‘Lucid Dream Projections’ because you are projecting directly into a lucid dream with full awareness.

Remember how I said *anything* is possible in a Lucid Dream? Well, it is, but only if you *believe* that. What you believe in a Lucid Dream is very powerful, because your thoughts will create that reality virtually instantly. And this includes limiting beliefs too. As Henry Ford said: “Believe you can, believe you can’t; either way you’re right!” And don’t forget: “the impossible is achieved by those who believe it possible.”

For example, you might be merrily flying along and think, “but this is impossible” – only to find the next moment you are plummeting to the ground – because you just *made it* impossible! But wait, you rethink: “it was possible a moment ago, so it must be possible after all.” Ah, now you’re flying again! See what I mean?

This has more subtle implications when we start to attempt greater dream control. Initially we may need to use tricks like looking away and back again to convince ourselves that the change we desire is possible. With more practice however, we can focus the power of belief and *will* changes to happen as we’re looking at them. It’s more convenient and it’s more fun to watch. Because I have to say, morphing dream objects, characters and environments looks *really cool!* (As does creating out of thin air.)

In your initial Lucid Dreaming experiences, you *may* have only limited control, but this is mostly due to unfamiliarity. We have become accustomed to the limitations of physical life. But as you try a few things and you start to find anything is possible, your confidence builds. And what is confidence if not a *belief* in your own ability?

It’s important to be very careful what you believe about Lucid Dreaming, especially to begin with, as it will affect your experience. Don’t take all the information that you read on the subject at face value if it implies a ‘cannot’ – you could just be blindly picking up someone elses limiting beliefs.

For example, can you say your own name in a Lucid Dream? Yes! But an early dream researcher and author wrote that you couldn’t, and whoever believed him couldn’t either! But dream researcher Stephen LaBerge put this superstition to the test without believing it and of course succeeded. Like Stevie Wonder said: “If you believe in things that you don’t understand, then you suffer. Superstition ain’t the way.”

Another example I’ve seen online is “lucid dreamers do not have complete control over their dreams.” This is truly a terrible thing to tell beginners, because they might believe it and not even try! No, while it’s certainly true that not all lucid dreamers have complete control, I want to stress it is a *learnable skill*! I’ve had many Lucid Dreams where I’ve created the dream landscape *as* I’m walking through it, and countless others where I’ve changed *any* facet of the dream I like.

So that’s the Third Key to Lucid Dreaming: *BELIEF*. Use it, don’t be used by it.

Recently I’ve been getting back into a course I bought a while ago but have just been plain too busy to read… and it’s really pretty cool.

It’s a six week course on training your psychic abilities by highly successful self development author Bradley Thompson. He’s also a widely respected scientist, and as far as he’s concerned, psychic abilities are just another branch of science that we don’t fully understand yet.

Well, as far as we’re both concerned, the truth is we’re all ‘psychic’, we all have these gifts – we simply need to learn how to use them. And fortunately, we we don’t have to understand them in ‘scientific terms’ to do so. It’s just.. how often do we get it explained to us in a simple, understandable way that we can actually *use*?

To me that’s what makes this course pretty good, it doesn’t stuff you round with big words, complex formulas or ridiculous practices. It focuses on your psychic development, not someone elses theories.

So why not check this out for yourself? To begin with, there’s a free mini-course for anyone interested in finding out more about their psychic potential here.